Category: Nature
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The Full Moon Shatters into Rain
This full moon brought rain and green leaves. A glass sphere, its surface frosted and etched by windblown dust, shattered into glistening streaks and bubbles as it poured waterfalls and tendrils of green light. Amid thunderclouds, the rising and setting moon shone with a clear warm glow, like the swirling, molten sphere that forms as silver…
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Happy Pineapple Cactus Day!
Today was “bloom day” for the endangered Pima Pineapple Cactus. The plant pictured above is the largest of several that grow in the desert near my house (my cactus website has more photos). All plants usually bloom on the same day, three to five days after the first significant monsoon rain. This year, the past five days…
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Chubasco!
This is one of several mysterious pictographs in a rockhouse near the Gila River. The outer circle is pinkish-white clay or possibly chalk (caliche). The black circle is actually dark purple and is probably magnetite sand. The red circle is, of course, hematite (red ochre). The green is malachite (copper ore). Upon close examination, it appears that the…
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Full Moon: Eye of the Moth
An echo from yesterday’s post – the triple-segmented seedpods of Agave parviflora, the smallest of all the agaves. In the U.S., this variety is found only in the oak grasslands of the Atascosa/Pajarito mountains. We explored a dirt road to the border today and saw several of them. The miniature seedpods are the size of…
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A Line Between Worlds
Yesterday we went for a drive along the U.S. – Mexico border south of the Huachuca Mountains – a journey through oak grassland that glows like a bowl of light, ending at cliffs and a spring where we hunted for ferns and watched butterflies. Here, the border is a steel wire no thicker than the…
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Summer Solstice
Midsummer, 105 degrees! The coralbeans shown above are blooming now – I took the photos on Sunday. The toxic seeds are typically bright red but sometimes they fade, like the ones in the photo. In the Mexican thorn forest, Erythrina flabelliformis is a tree, with wood that is strong enough to use for tool handles. Here it…
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Crescent Moons
Last night’s crescent moon was a thin silver wire or a fishbone needle. Tonight it is a cat fang. Tomorrow it will be the curved, sturdy claw of a bird of prey, a cat, or a mud turtle. I have collected these crescent symbols for a long time, but today I expanded the list and…
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Dark Moon: So Black, It’s Green.
Tonight the scrying pool of the Dark Moon is more than a black mirror. Now the Sun is strong enough to illuminate its shadowy green depths, since this moon will reflect the Summer Solstice light. At the edge of the pool are tiny bubblelike jelly spheres of Nostoc, the same cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) that…
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